Current alternatives in the cloud computing market

Nowadays cloud environments include hundreds of independent, heterogeneous, private/hybrid clouds, but many business operators have predicted that the process toward interoperable cloud scenarios will begin in the near future. In order to analyzing the actual platform, Table ‎2-3 introduces a few important cloud computing offers and specify the type of provided services according to the service/delivery model classification presented previously.

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Table ‎2-3 Current alternatives in the cloud computing market.

Company Service Company’s description

1 Amazon EC2 Infrastructure as a Service

Since staking its claim with Amazon Web Services in early 2006, Amazon.com has established itself as a pioneer. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) users obtain and configure capacity and control computing resources while running them on Amazon‘s environment. The real draw is the ability to add capacity and scale in seconds, or reduce capacity as needed while customers only pay for what they use. It also is designed for use with other Amazon Web Services.

2 GoGrid Platform as a Service

Do you have only minutes to build an enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure? GoGrid‘s got you covered. The GoGrid platform lets users deploy Web and database cloud services, mount infinite-volume cloud storage, add load-balancing and create, save and deploy custom cloud server images. GoGrid makes it even easier by tying in API libraries and tools.

3 Google Software as a Service

If there were any doubt that cloud computing -- and Google Apps in particular -- were ready for prime time, it dissipated last year when the Los Angeles city government adopted Google's e-mail and on-demand applications under a $7.25 million contract. L.A. chose Google Apps over Microsoft, which competed for the sale. What's more, in early 2009 the company began offering its Google Apps Premier Edition hosted office productivity software through solution providers for the first time.

4 Google App

Engine

Platform as a Service

With Google App Engine, users can build, run and maintain their applications on Google‘s infrastructure with no servers to maintain. Apps can be served from their own domain or a free domain on Google‘s appspot.com domain. As with most platforms, App Engine is pay to play. It supports several programming languages and costs nothing to get started. Apps have up to 500 MB of storage and enough CPU bandwidth to support an app serving about 5 million page views a month.

5 IBM

Infrastructure as a Service (Storage

IBM's Smart Business Storage Cloud is a private cloud service that supports multiple petabytes of data and billions of files. It is based on IBM's blade server and XIV storage technologies.

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Company Service Company’s description

Vendors) The service lets businesses build an on-site storage cloud managed by IBM, or back up data to one of IBM's own data centers. IBM also plans to build a business-grade public cloud for storage.

6 IBM Software

as a Service

Many industry observers have long viewed IBM's Lotus division as one more road-kill victim of the Microsoft juggernaut. But Lotus is meeting with some success with its LotusLive offerings, a collection of on-demand collaboration and communications applications that provide an alternative to on-premise applications such as Microsoft Office and cloud- computing personal productivity tools such as Google Apps.

7 IBM Infrastructure as a Service

When it comes to the cloud, IBM isn't messing around. The proof is in the pudding with its Smart Business Cloud services and solutions. With its combination of services and systems, which comprises public and private clouds and cloud-based versions of some of IBM's most popular applications, IBM is looking to the cloud for everything from analytics and software and services delivery to services such as storage management and cloud-based e-mail, scheduling and contact information.

8 Microsoft Platform as a Service

Windows Azure is Microsoft‘s cloud computing platform, available now for free. Set to debut Feb. 1 as a paid service, Azure offers an environment for developers to create cloud apps and services. The platform will also run alongside current Microsoft environments offering an OS as a service in

Windows Azure, a relational database in the cloud in Microsoft SQL Azure and the Windows Azure platform AppFabric, which eases connections between cloud and on- premise apps.

9 Open Nebula Infrastructure as a Service

This open-source toolkit fits snuggly into existing data center environments to build any type of cloud deployment. OpenNebula can be used to manage virtual infrastructure in the data center or to manage a private cloud. It also supports hybrid clouds to combine local infrastructure with public cloud infrastructure for hosting environments. Additionally, it

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Company Service Company’s description

supports public clouds by offering cloud interfaces to expose its functionality for virtual machine, storage and network management.

10 RackSpace Platform as a Service

With its CloudServers offering, RackSpace delivers servers on-demand via a cloud-driven platform of virtualized servers. Users can add new instances and reduce instances within seconds while paying for what‘s provisioned. It also offers CloudSites, a fully-managed Web hosting platform that lets the users code it and load it and offers patching and security, monitoring, redundancy, clustering and the power of the cloud. Add to that RackSpace‘s CloudFiles file storage and hosting in the cloud, and the platform is complete.

11 Salesforce.com Platform as a Service

The cloud computing behemoth is kicking its presence up a notch. Its Force.com development platform lets users log in, build an app and push it out into the cloud. All told, it‘s supposed to help build and run applications faster at a fraction of the cost of traditional software platforms. The platform includes a database, security, workflow, user interface and other tools to guide the process for building business apps, mobile apps and Web sites.

12 Salesforce.com Software as a Service

What Salesforce.com has done is popularize the concept of cloud computing, turning a vague IT architectural concept into a mainstream computing practice and providing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) SaaS applications that -- for many businesses --were their entre into cloud computing. Salesforce has sought to solidify its position as a SaaS/cloud computing leader with its Force.com platform and

infrastructure tools for developing and running cloud computing applications. Yet Salesforce's on-demand CRM sales and customer service applications still account for the bulk of the company's sales.